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We're revisiting our Evolve benchmark, now that the game has fully launched and (some) drivers have been updated. Our previous Evolve bench tested the game's beta, but disclaimed heavily that the beta meant a lack of driver support and software-side optimization. The return benchmark uses much of the same methodology and represents the same game as previously, so this article will be a bit shorter in length.

AMD's Gaming Evolved software application – a partnership with Raptr – has been compromised in a security exploit and is encouraging users to change passwords. The utility is used for game video capture (similar to ShadowPlay, but web-enabled), but also enables easier drive management and game-hardware integration (settings optimization for video cards, similar to GeForce Experience).

Anyone who pays attention to computing knows that Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been struggling for some time. They are in the unfortunate position of being #2 (of two) for CPUs, second to Intel. AMD primarily focuses on the budget-market with APUs and CPUs that outperform Intel’s directly-competing options in that range. In the GPU market, AMD is again #2 (of two) to NVIDIA for discrete GPUs, and this is a vicious and close marketing battle.

AMD has exhibited a steady downward spiral in their stock prices for the past 4 years.

NVidia's GTX 960 is intended to target the market seeking the best video card for the money – a segment that both AMD and nVidia call the “sweet spot” – and is advertised as capable of playing most modern games on high settings or better. The GTX 960 uses a new Maxwell GPU, called the GM206, for which the groundwork was laid by the GTX 980's GM204 GPU. In our GTX 980 review, we mentioned that per-core performance and per-watt performance had increased substantially, resulting in a specs listing that exhibits a lower core count and smaller memory interface. AMD has leveraged these number changes in recent marketing outreaches, something we'll discuss in the conclusion.

This GeForce GTX 960 review tests the new ASUS Strix 960 video card against the 970, 760, R9 285, & others. The benchmark analyzes GTX 960 FPS performance in titles like Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, EVOLVE, and other modern titles. The GTX 960 is firmly designed for 1080p gaming, which is where the vast majority of monitors currently reside.

It’s no secret that AMD (NASDAQ: AMD) has been struggling financially in recent years. For quite some time, AMD has posted net losses, and 3Q14 looked to be a turning point for AMD. It seems that the expectations have fallen short, given AMD’s freshly-posted financial results for the fourth quarter (and entire ear) of 2014, none of which are encouraging for the financial future of the company.

Last seen at CES 2014, AMD's FreeSync demo went live shortly after nVidia's fanfare about G-Sync, a technology we overviewed here (read this content if you're unfamiliar with frame synchronization). FreeSync and G-Sync are both adaptive refresh rate technologies that effectively ensure the display slaves to the GPU, allowing for a smoother frame output by eliminating both tearing and stuttering (V-Sync on).

AMD may have just given the nod of recognition to overclockers looking for a more aptly-priced APU. The company just provided the information at CES 2015 that they are set to release the A8-7650K, providing an unlocked SKU among the A8s. At an MSRP of $105, the A8-7650K is only $6 more than the A8-7600, which is not unlocked. We believe that the small step in price difference was done to address community complaints about larger price differences between regular and unlocked versions of the A10 APUs. The 7650K will come with 10 compute cores (4 CPU + 6 GPU) and have a base frequency of 3.3 GHz with the ability to turbo up to 3.7 GHz. Like the other Kaveri APUs, there is full support for Mantle and OpenCL 2.0.

In a bid to garner attention in the graphics market, AMD's Radeon graphics division has branded its newest Catalyst driver update simply as “Omega.” Unlike previous iterations, the new driver attaches a codename to symbolize the dramatic changes made to the underlying software. Catalyst Omega introduces direct competitors to NVIDIA technology (like DSR, seen here), offers greater Linux support, and hosts a suite of media playback smoothing options. We'll look into all of those here, along with some driver benchmarks.

Here's a quick overview, as provided by AMD (note that AMD's numbers differ from our benchmark numbers, shown and explained further below):

Like many sites, our site relies heavily upon referral commission from online retail outlets. It's a fairly straight-forward operation: We help our readers build computers, find the right video card, and test games; in return for this free service, we earn a small commission on sales from Newegg, Amazon, and similar online retail outlets. It's not a lot of money, but it's something.

Now that Black Friday is over and all of the sales are reporting in, we started analyzing data to see which items were the most popular referred purchases through our site. This isn't representative of the most popular hardware in the industry – just what was recommended on our site – but is a good cross-section for what PC builders are interested in.

We're working our way through all of the major system components and peripherals, hopefully providing easy-to-use buyer's guides for the best components of 2014. Our most recent buyer's guides covered top-performing gaming video cards, mechanical keyboards, and gaming laptops.

This next guide focuses on the best Intel & AMD gaming CPUs on the market, ranging from ultra-budget (~$100) options to high-end semi-production solutions (~$300). Consider following our gaming motherboard buyer's guide to accompany any CPU purchases.